Production of digluon and quark-antiquark dijets in central exclusive processes

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the production of dijets, including Higgs, quark-antiquark, and digluon pairs, in exclusive central processes, evaluating backgrounds and proposing cuts to improve Higgs detection.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed calculation of exclusive dijet production, including a new mechanism for gluon emission, and assesses background reduction strategies for Higgs searches.

Findings

The irreducible $b\bar{b}$ background to Higgs production is quantified.

Imposing cuts on $b$-jet transverse momenta and rapidities improves the signal-to-background ratio.

The new gluon emission mechanism has a small but notable contribution.

Abstract

We discuss exclusive central production of Higgs boson, quark-antiquark and digluon dijets. Some differential distributions are shown and disussed. Irreducible leading-order $b \bar b $ background to Higgs production is calculated. The signal-to-background ratio is shown and improvements are suggested by imposing cuts on $b$ ($\bar b$) transverse momenta and rapidities. We disuss also gluonic dijet production. Here we use rather reggeon-reggeon-gluon vertices. We discuss briefly also a new mechanism of emission of gluons from different $t$-channel gluons (reggeons). The latter contribution turned out to be rather small. When gluons are missidentified as $b$ or $\bar b$ jets the latter contribution constitutes a reducible but large contribution to exclusive Standard Model Higgs boson.